The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices.
Energy consumption is becoming a growing concern for enterprise storage clouds. Specifically, as workloads are added to a storage cloud, the corresponding power/energy consumption goes up, which can drive up operational costs. Different workloads have different characteristics that may be defined in terms of Input/Output (I/O) per second, cache hit rate, read-write ratio, random-sequential ratio, etc. In addition to the type and configuration of underlying storage resources, these workload parameters also influence the amount of energy consumed by the corresponding workloads. Ad-hoc allocation of storage resources may result in inefficient resource utilization as well as higher energy consumption.